Essay on Vietnam, Iraq, WTC, etc.
by Steve Chase.
Essay on Vietnam, Iraq, WTC, etc.
by Steve Chase.
I've been thinking about the open letter Julie posted in this forum last
week objecting to two points I made in my first email about my intense
horror at the recent terrorist attacks against US citizens in NYC, DC, and
PA. The two points she objected to were my claims that: 1) the US government
has frequently used state terror against civilian populations around the
world, and 2) this has most likely caused much of the anti-American
sentiment that many people in the Third World feel, including many people in
the Middle East.
I do get, however, why Julie was so upset with me--why my letter felt to her
like some kind of callous heresy. Indeed, much of this weekend I have been
thinking back to the time in my life when I would have completely agreed
with her that "as a proud citizen of the greatest nation in the world," I'd
be "greatly saddened and offended" by any suggestion "that our nation and
our actions are somehow comparable to the terrorist events of Tuesday." I
clearly remember a time when I would have agreed with her--without any
qualifications--and agreed that "our government and military, despite their
shortcomings and mistakes, defend freedom and democracy not only for its own
citizens but also for humanity." I've been asking myself, why isn't that
true for me anymore? Why am I so critical of the US government's military
and foreign policy record?
Looking back, I can pretty much pinpoint the exact moment when my view began
to shift from how Julie currently views our government's role in the world
to my current view. The year was 1967 and I was twelve years old. Back then,
I would easily have described my feelings about our country exactly as
Julie. I was even an ardent supporter of what I saw as a defensive US
military action to protect the legitimate, democratic government of South
Vietnam against the vicious, immoral, and undemocratic Communist government
of North Vietnam. Really, you would have been hard pressed to find a more
patriotic, more pro-military, little boy.
That Christmas, however, my older brother came home from college and
cracked my world wide open. Over dinner, he told my mother and me about
being teargassed by police at a student demonstration against the Vietnam
War. I was shocked. I felt like my brother was a traitor. I couldn't believe
that he could think our government's activities in Vietnam were an example
of state terrorism against a poor nation seeking national independence from
foreign domination. I started yelling at him, calling him names, and I
quickly turned to my Mom for support. I said to her, "You don't believe what
he says, do you?" Her answer shocked me even more. She said, "Stevie, there
is a lot more going on in Vietnam than what our government tells us. I think
Chris is right to oppose this war. I think it is immoral." I left the table
crying in disbelief. I just couldn't believe what I was hearing--just like
Julie couldn't believe what I said in my last email.
My own response to being offended by my family's seemingly crazy statements
about the US government's role in Vietnam, was to read everything I could
about the Vietnam conflict. I wanted to be able to argue intelligently with
them and to prove my mother and brother wrong! What I found out, however,
when I really started looking closely at the situation, was that the US war
in Vietnam was not a "good and just war" as I had been told by our nation's
leaders. It was--as I so painfully came to see--a case of our government
sending young American boys over to Vietnam and putting them in a position
to slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who did not want us
in Vietnam and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and armed guerrilla
militias fighting for national independence. Indeed, our brave soldiers,
through no fault of their own--and who were now being shot at as "imperial
invaders"--were being sent to conduct an immoral campaign of state terror
against the people of an impoverished nation. I was horrified and
heartbroken, just like I am this week as I watch my TV in horror and wonder
about how I can help and what we could do as a country to help end terrorism
around the world.
Just what facts did I learn during my teenage years that led me to this
highly critical view of how our government often uses military power in the
world? First, I learned that Vietnam had been a colony of France's for many
years and that French rule was resented and had been increasingly resisted
by the Vietnamese.
I could understand that. Our own nation was born in an
anti-colonial struggle against an imperial European power. That made me feel
sympathetic to the Vietnamese people. Second, I learned that during the last
few years of the French war to maintain their colonial control over the
Vietnamese people, the US government--with US taxpayers' money--covertly
supplied about 90% of France's war budget.
That startling fact about the US
military budget was the first chink in the armor of my earlier faith that
the US government always stands up for freedom and democracy around the
world. My new view was, well, sometimes maybe yes, sometimes maybe no.
Next, I learned that when the Vietnamese finally exhausted France's will to
fight, a peace treaty was negotiated and signed between Vietnam and France
and co-signed by the United States as an impartial guarantor of the peace
accords.
The terms of the treaty were for the country of Vietnam to be
temporarily divided, with the Vietnamese independence fighters consolidating
themselves temporarily to the northern section of the country, thus allowing
France time to withdraw from the south without further conflict. Also,
according to the terms of the treaty, free elections were to be held as soon
as the French withdrawal was complete so the Vietnamese people could freely
select a new, independent, national government of their own choosing for the
whole of Vietnam. That seemed like a good outcome to me, and I was proud
that the US government seemed to have come around to supporting Vietnam's
right to national self-determination after years of secretly siding with
French colonial rule.
However, the next fact I learned nearly crushed me. The elections never
happened. They were called off by the United States. Why? The reason is very
scary and it was explained by President Eisenhower in his published memoirs.
Eisenhower had been told by the CIA that if free elections were held in
Vietnam that the popular nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh, an iconoclastic
Marxist inspired by both Mao Zedong and Thomas Jefferson, would win a
landslide victory over all the other likely candidates.
In fact, the CIA
estimated that Ho's party would win by over 80% of the vote! On the basis of
this estimate of the election results, free elections were blocked by the US
and our government then unilaterally set up, funded, and armed a
"pro-American" puppet government in the southern portion of the country and
declared South Vietnam a permanent government and a separate nation from the
north.
I then learned that the great majority of people in Vietnam opposed these
developments and soon began agitating against the puppet government and the
illegal division of their country into two separate nations. Much of this
resistance was nonviolent, but the new puppet government, with funding and
training from the CIA and US military advisors, became very repressive.
Dissidents were jailed, protesting nuns were shot, opposition political
organizations were crushed, freedom of the press was curtailed. At this
point, several groups of dissident southern Vietnamese citizens then
reorganized guerrilla bands to fight the US puppet government and they also
asked for military assistance from their remaining compatriots to the north
of the temporary dividing line created by the peace treaty.
The so-called South Vietnamese government was very unstable, of course, and
increasingly hated by the majority of the Vietnamese people because of its
origin, because of its brutal and violent suppression of opposition and
dissent, and because it was increasingly at war with its own
people--killing, maiming, and torturing them. At this point, US military and
foreign policy planners arranged for the unpopular, illegal, and
illegitimate government of South Vietnam to request US military assistance
in its effort to fight off an "invasion from the North." This gave the US
government the pretext it needed for the American people to believe that we
had been invited to South Vietnam to defend a legitimate democratic
government facing unprovoked aggression from another country to the north.
It was a complete propaganda sham, however, meant to justify a US invasion
of a sovereign nation seeking independence from continued foreign rule.
As I did more listening to the stories of returning soldiers and digging
into history books, news reports, white papers from human rights groups, and
formerly classified military and foreign policy planning documents, I also
soon got a clearer picture of how the US began to invade Vietnam with more
than military advisors, weapons, and huge amounts of our tax dollars in the
early 1960s.
It invaded with ground troops, then more and more ground
troops, and navy ships in Vietnam's territorial waters, and planes in its
skies that began to rain down chemical and biological weapons like Agent
Orange--which are still causing thousands of birth defects in Vietnam to
this day--and napalm was dropped, a combustible jelly developed by the Dow
Chemical Company that gruesomely burned villagers, farmers, and soldiers and
caused slow and painful deaths.
Then cluster bombs, which were designed to
send small shards of shrapnel through the bodies of civilians and resistance
fighters, were also dropped so that the victims would slowly bleed to death
in agony (thus spreading fear into the hearts of survivors), and, soon, more
and more regular bombs were dropped indiscriminately over the Vietnamese
countryside, both to kill thousands of Vietnamese citizens and to force the
terrified survivors into US government-controlled "pacification camps."
Concentrated civilian populations in still independent cities like Hanoi
were also purposely targeted for mass destruction. Land mines were also
planted everywhere and several of these kept killing civilians long after
the US invasion was defeated by the Vietnamese. Assassination squads, part
of so-called "Operation Phoenix," were also soon organized by the US
government to murder village leaders who were suspected of being dissidents
or sympathizers with the guerrillas. Even Buddhist dissidents that didn't
approve of their fellow citizens' guerrilla tactics were jailed, tortured,
or murdered by the US government forces and the police and military forces
of the US puppet government. Their crime--peacefully opposing an
illegitimate government. And innocent children suffered enormously--thousands and thousands of innocent children were murdered,
maimed, orphaned, and disfigured throughout north and south Vietnam as a
consequence of the US terror campaign. Then the US invasion moved into Laos
and Cambodia killing thousands more civilians there.
All of this terror, death, and destruction should not be confused with
somehow being a mere tactical mistake, or an unfortunate bit of "collateral
damage." It was US government policy. It was part of a very cold and
calculated strategy designed by some the "best and the brightest" minds in
America's military and academic circles to break the will of the Vietnamese
people and force them to give up their struggle for national unification
under a leadership chosen by themselves. The cold and calculated nature of
this strategy is thoroughly revealed in the "Pentagon Papers," the secret US
war planning documents that were finally released to a horrified American
public by an angry Pentagon official, a brave whistleblower who could no
longer stomach the lies and state terror conducted by our government in the
name of freedom, democracy, and "defense" against "foreign" military
aggression.
According to those US government documents, Vietnam's independence and its
democratically-desired choice to experiment with a village-based, agrarian
socialism had to be stopped because it potentially represented "the threat
of a good example"--a type of independence and development that might better
meet the needs of a country's majority, but would also likely conflict with
the profit-maximizing goals of large American corporations. This analysis is
laid out right in the Pentagon's own documents. There was also talk of the
oil and strategic metals that US companies and the US government wanted
unrestricted access to.
There is even more--in the Pentagon Papers there is also clear documentation
of a fact that is not well-known by most Americans, and which is certainly
remembered by very few today. That fact is that Richard Nixon, Henry
Kissinger, and other high-level war planners (yes, the very same people who
used the CIA to help overthrow the democratically-elected government of
Chile and establish a military dictatorship that murdered thousands of its
own citizens) actually devised a plan to drop nuclear weapons on several
population centers in Vietnam. Why? Because they were increasingly desperate
to find a way to break the seemingly unstoppable resistance of the
Vietnamese people.
Why didn't they end up dropping the nukes? Well,
according to the secret memos and reports finally published in the Pentagon
Papers, they ultimately calculated that the US peace movement was too strong
by that point in the war and that the United States would become completely
ungovernable by the current government due to the massive, popular,
nonviolent resistance that was expected all across the country if US war
planners crossed the line and dropped nuclear weapons on a civilian
population again--something which most assuredly would have been an act of
mass murder and collective punishment to achieve political objectives. (Is
there any more accurate definition of terrorism?)
The US peace movement thus ended up saving thousands of lives by at least
stopping that one barbaric act of terrorism--all because US war planners
feared the movement's growing power and popularity. It is even possible, in
that one moment of Pentagon recalculation, that the peace movement may have
even saved the world from descending into an all out nuclear war between the
United States and Russia or China. There is no way to know for sure, of
course, but it is possible that this is true. (Have you hugged a peace
activist today?)
Anyway, after I began learning this history as a teenager--a history of
state terrorism documented in our government's own records--I could no
longer believe the same comforting views I used to hold about our
government. I wanted to, but I couldn't. It just no longer fit the facts as
I knew them. My view of our government was fundamentally altered by this
painful awakening. I threw myself into the peace movement in my little home
town in Illinois. I have tried ever since to work as effectively as I can to
stop all forms of terrorism, whether directed at the American people by
groups or nations which have come to hate the US government, or whether
directed outward by the US government against other peoples. (Vietnam, by
the way, is hardly the only example of such barbarism by the US government;
there have been many examples of US state terrorism in every decade
since--including many in the Middle East--some even with much higher
civilian death tolls than the incredible and vicious carnage that our own
murdered compatriots have just experienced in Pennsylvania, New York, and
Washington, DC.) I simply can't believe that this fact hasn't created social
conditions around the world that are condusive to the development of
anti-American terrorism.
Does my criticalner, killing 290.
1981, 1986: U.S. holds military maneuvers off the coast of Libya with
the clear purpose of provoking Qaddafi. In 1981, a Libyan plane fires a
missile and two Libyan planes were subsequently shot down. In 1986,
Libya fires missiles that land far from any target and U.S. attacks
Libyan patrol boats, killing 72, and shore installations. When a bomb
goes off in a Berlin nightclub, killing two, the U.S. charges that
Qaddafi was behind it (possibly true) and conducts major bombing raids
in Libya, killing dozens of civilians, including Qaddafi's adopted
daughter.
1982: U.S. gives "green light" to Israeli invasion of Lebanon, where
more than 10,000 civilians were killed. U.S. chooses not to invoke its
laws prohibiting Israeli use of U.S. weapons except in self-defense.
1983: U.S. troops sent to Lebanon as part of a multinational
peacekeeping force; intervene on one side of a civil war. Withdraw after
suicide bombing of marine barracks.
1984: U.S.-backed rebels in Afghanistan fire on civilian airliner.
1988: Saddam Hussein kills many thousands of his own Kurdish population
and uses chemical weapons against them. The U.S. increases its economic
ties to Iraq.
1990-91: U.S. rejects diplomatic settlement of the Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait (for example, rebuffing any attempt to link the two regional
occupations, of Kuwait and Palestine). U.S. leads international
coalition in war against Iraq. Civilian infrastructure targeted. To
promote "stability" U.S. refuses to aid uprisings by Shi'ites in the
south and Kurds in the north, denying the rebels access to captured
Iraqi weapons and refusing to prohibit Iraqi helicopter flights.
1991-: Devastating economic sanctions are imposed on Iraq. U.S. and
Britain block all attempts to lift them. Hundreds of thousands die.
Though Security Council stated sanctions were to be lifted once
Hussein's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction were ended,
Washington makes it known that the sanctions would remain as long as
Saddam remains in power. Sanctions strengthen Saddam's position.
1993-: U.S. launches missile attack on Iraq, claiming self-defense
against an alleged assassination attempt on former president Bush two
months earlier.
1998: U.S. and U.K. bomb Iraq over weapons inspections, even though
Security Council is just then meeting to discuss the matter.
1998: U.S. destroys factory producing half of Sudan's pharmaceutical
supply, claiming retaliation for attacks on U.S. embassies in Tanzania
and Kenya and that factory was involved in chemical warfare. U.S. later
acknowledges there is no evidence for the chemical warfare charge.
This list doesn't even focus much on the fact that the US government has
supported Israel's illegal military occupation of Palestinian land since
1967, yet carpet-bombed much of Iraq, a predominantly Muslim country,
because of its few-weeks-old illegal military occupation of Kuwait--and in
the process killed at least 50,000 civilians, destroyed that nation's
infrastructure, and then implemented a series of sanctions that the UN
estimates has resulted in the deaths of over 500,000 children. For many in
the region, that smack's of a horrible, anti-Islamic double standard that
has more to do with controlling oil supplies and maintaining imperial power
than with any even handed commitment to the rule of law, national
self-determination, and human rights.
I wish in his speech, Bush had mentioned all of these things as part of
his answer, apologized to the people of the Middle East, and then outlined a
new foreign and military policy that would respect the lives of civilians,
withdraw support from repressive regimes, end support for Israel's
occupation of Palestinian territory (while supporting Israel's right to
exist within its legitimate borders), and end the sanctions against Iraq
that have not achieved their stated objectives, but have resulted in the
painful deaths of half a million starving children. If he had done that,
we--and the people of the Middle East--could take him seriously as someone
committed to ending all terrorism--instead of someone committed to
maintaining our system of massive US state terrorism while only seeking to
stop smaller-scale anti-American terrorism (which, of course, needs to be
stopped too).
Steve